This book sat on my shelves for a while as I waited to be in the right intellectual head space to tackle it. Finally I picked it up not because I was focussed and had time to adequately devote to it but because I was going somewhere where I wanted people to be if not impressed then at least not disapproving of my taste in reading material. For I am shallow and care what smart people think of me.
I loved the concept of this book, which explores The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, and combines two of my favourite (strictly amateur) interests – paleoanthropology and linguistics (in the form of the origins of communication). Mithen’s work, which strongly reads like a PhD thesis, explores the previously under-examined idea that music was and is an important part of what makes us human; that, rather than being an unimportant and accidental by-product of our evolution it is a key part of our development, ability to communicate, and an integral aspect to making our minds work.
Chapters explore the cases of individuals who have music without language (acquired conditions like aphasia and congenital communication problems like autism) and language without music (a condition of which I was previously unaware – amusia); how music is processed in the brain; how cadence or ‘prosody’, (“the dynamics, speed and timbre” that give speech melody and influence meaning) affects oral communication, and how this is reflected in music; how infant-directed speech (IDS) is similar to and different from pet-directed speech (PDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS); how primates communicate; how bipedalism allowed for rhythmic movements and how music is physically expressed; how evolving changes in our predecessors jaws, throats and mouths resulted in the ability to create verbal music; how (in separate chapters) music is intertwined with sex, parenting and group bonding; and more.
Parts of this book were fascinating, and without it I would never have been aware of the differences as well as similarities between IDS and PDS (both of which I was previously briefly acquainted with), or the fact that cat-directed and dog-directed speech is undifferentiated. That sounds sarcastic – I really was fascinated. And the case studies in the chapters discussing individuals who have either music or language were of particular interest to me.
I also found fascinating the discussions of research looking at how people associate the sounds of particular words with specific attributes - sound synaesthesia: for example, one researcher found that, if told that 'mil' and 'mal' were words for tables, 98% of people thought 'mal' meant a larger table. This synaesthetic link between words and objects extends to fish/bird pairings and round/spiky shapes.
Mithen’s research field is admirable – he has incorporated aspects of dozens of specialty fields, and the book includes recent as well as classic findings from other researchers, combined to give a unique perspective on a deserving topic. But the book is far more technical than I anticipated, and toward the end I had to make myself pick it up each time (or leave home with nothing else to read), and I’m sure that having a better (read ‘any’) knowledge of musicology would have helped me through some sections. I’m glad I read it, and I recommended it to those with a technical or academic interest in the topics raised, but it’s a little heavy going if (like me) you’re something of an intellectual lightweight. – Alex
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